The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

by Thomas M. Nichols

Our cultural and literary life is full of premature burials of everything: shame, common sense, manliness, femininity, childhood, good taste, literacy, the Oxford comma, and so on.

The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance.

No, the bigger problem is that we’re proud of not knowing things.

To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything.

Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health and vitality in a democracy.

People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Isaac Asimov

the public not only expressed strong views, but respondents actually showed enthusiasm for military intervention in Ukraine in direct proportion to their lack of knowledge about Ukraine.

These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything.

Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge.

And let’s face it: watching people confidently improvise opinions about ludicrous scenarios like whether “Margaret Thatcher’s absence at Coachella is beneficial in terms of North Korea’s decision to launch a nuclear weapon” never gets old.

is not a dialogue between experts and the larger community, but the use of established knowledge as an off-the-shelf convenience as needed and only so far as desired.

The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.

Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s.

And yet the result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.

When students become valued clients instead of learners, they gain a great deal of self-esteem, but precious little knowledge; worse, they do not develop the habits of critical thinking that would allow them to continue to learn and to evaluate the kinds of complex issues on which they will have to deliberate and vote as citizens.

This does not mean that every American must engage in deep study of policy, but if citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives, they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.

Experts have a responsibility to educate. Voters have a responsibility to learn. In

we now live in an age where misinformation pushes aside knowledge.

We want to believe we are capable of making all kinds of decisions, and we chafe at the person who corrects us, or tells us we’re wrong, or instructs us in things we don’t understand. This natural human reaction among individuals is dangerous when it becomes a shared characteristic among entire societies.

Maybe it’s not that people are any dumber or any less willing to listen to experts than they were a hundred years ago: it’s just that we can hear them all now.

Hofstadter argued—and this was back in 1963—that this overwhelming complexity produced feelings of helplessness and anger among a citizenry that knew itself increasingly to be at the mercy of smarter elites.

This is the root cause of the hostile attitudes that we see everywhere today .

More disturbing is that Americans have done little in those intervening decades to remedy the gap between their own knowledge and the level of information required to participate in an advanced democracy.

Not all of that is their fault. Part of the blame rests on those in power who work to precent challengers by suppressing public education

At the root of all this is an inability among laypeople to understand that experts being wrong on occasion about certain issues is not the same thing as experts being wrong consistently on everything.

Americans no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to disrespect. To correct another is to insult. And to refuse to acknowledge all views as worthy of consideration, no matter how fantastic or inane they are, is to be closed-minded.

Reasoned skepticism is essential not only to science but also to a healthy democracy.

the death of expertise is more like a national bout of ill temper, a childish rejection of authority in all its forms coupled to an insistence that strongly held opinions are indistinguishable from facts.

Otherwise, our highly evolved society breaks down into islands of incoherence, where we spend our time in poorly informed second-guessing instead of trusting each other.

Experts stay engaged in their field, continually improve their skills, learn from their mistakes, and have visible track records. Over the span of their career, they get better, or at least maintain their high level of competence, and couple it to the wisdom—again, an intangible—that comes from time.

Another mark of true experts is their acceptance of evaluation and correction by other experts. Every

there is considerable wisdom in the old Chinese warning to beware a craftsman who claims twenty years of experience when in reality he’s only had one year of experience twenty times.

experts will make mistakes, but they are far less likely to make mistakes than a layperson.

Knowing things is not the same as understanding them. Comprehension is not the same thing as analysis. Expertise is a not a parlor game played with factoids.

Public debate over almost everything devolves into trench warfare, in which the most important goal is to establish that the other person is wrong.

No amount of education can teach someone the name of their member of Congress if they don’t care in the first place.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.

the “above average effect,” in which everyone thinks they’re … well, above average. This, as Dunning and Kruger dryly note, is “a result that defies the logic of descriptive statistics.”

“metacognition.” This is the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong.

Laypeople want a definitive answer from the experts, but none can be had because there is not one answer but many, depending on circumstances.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt summed it up neatly when he observed that when facts conflict with our values, “almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence.”

colleges and universities now provide a full-service experience of “going to college.” These are not remotely the same thing, and students now graduate believing they know a lot more than they actually

Americans with college degrees now broadly think of themselves as “educated” when in reality the best that many of them can say is that they’ve continued on in some kind of classroom setting after high school, with wildly varying results.

This cultural change is important to the death of expertise, because as programs proliferate to meet demand, schools become diploma mills whose actual degrees are indicative less of education than of training, two distinctly different concepts that are increasingly conflated in the public mind. In the worst cases, degrees affirm neither education nor training, but attendance. At the barest minimum, they certify only the timely payment of tuition.

Schools and colleges cause this degree inflation the same way governments cause monetary inflation: by printing more paper.

College as a client-centered experience caters to adolescents instead of escorting them away from adolescence.

They accept their degree as a receipt for spending several years around a lot of interesting people they and their families have paid for a service.

as a result they risk developing a toxic combination of insecurity and arrogance that serves them poorly once they’re beyond the embrace of their parents and the walls of their schools.

The fact of the matter is that “private colleges—at least those below the elite levels—are desperate for students and willing to accept deeply unqualified ones if it means more tuition dollars.”

But the fact of the matter is that more people than ever before are going to college, mostly by tapping a virtually inexhaustible supply of ruinous loans.

There’s nothing wrong with creating an attractive student center or offering a slew of activities, but at some point it’s like having a hospital entice heart patients to choose it for a coronary bypass because it has great food.